Oh, Spotify (Premium)

As part of my ongoing reevaluation of everything I use, I spent a lot of time this past week looking, again, at music streaming services. We currently subscribe to two, Spotify, because my kids use it, and Google Play Music, because I prefer it and use it myself. Obviously, I would like to save some money every month. And while it seems I could do so if I was able to pare that down to just Spotify—the kids, after all, aren’t interested in switching—it’s not that simple.

The Google bit is complicated.

On the one hand, Google Play Music is going away soon, and will be replaced by YouTube Music. Many have complained about this switch, since YouTube Music has continued to lag behind Google Play Music functionally, but I feel that’s it’s mostly caught up now. And the only features I miss (and require) are the ability to upload my music and port my playlists over. Both are coming, Google says. So no harm, no foul.

But there is a hidden benefit to using Google Play Music (and, I presume to YouTube Music in the future): You get ad-free access to YouTube. (And to YouTube Music, of course.) So my $9.99 per month goes a lot further than just Google Play Music. If I had to pay for YouTube Premium, which does have a  few other perks that I don’t care about, like offline videos, I’d pay $12.99 per month.

So switching to Spotify might not bring the cost savings I want. I have gotten quite used to the ad-free YouTube experience.

But I keep experimenting. And the more I look at Spotify over time, the more I’m blown away by how unusable it is in common scenarios. Here, I’ll focus solely on queue management because it’s so basic and necessary. That is, you start playing some music—a song, an album, a playlist, whatever—and then you want to do things like add more music, remove one or more songs, rearrange the order of songs, and so on.

My wife and I spend one night a week listening to music via the Sonos Play:5 system we bought from Brad in the sunroom. Google Play Music can play directly to Sonos, which is great because I prefer that app to the Sonos app because it lets me easily browse for new music while we listen; but the Spotify app also controls Sonos, so that’s not a unique advantage.

Typically, I’ll start a playlist playing on shuffle. And as the night progresses, we’ll add songs. If the order doesn’t matter, we can simply “add to queue” from the app and the new song will go wherever. But the order often does matter. And Google Play Music has a “play next” option that you can use on a song (or an album or whatever) to make sure you hear that next. We use it a lot.

Spotify does not offer “play next.” So all you can do is add a song to the queue, open the queue, find the new song, and then manually drag it to be under the currently-playing song. Which can be pretty far away.

Spotify does let you remove one or more songs from the queue, and while it’s a bit tedious it works well enough. But you can’t empty the whole queue at all, at least in the mobile app, unless you want to manually tap next to every single song in the list. I was sure I was missing something, so I Googled it, and sure enough, it’s not there. Spotify actually recommends clearing the queue by opening the Spotify desktop app on a computer instead. You can clear it from there. (It’s not in the web version either, I checked.)

These are very basic music management features. And it’s not just that I’ve gotten used to Google Play Music. That UI is just better, and it’s more full-featured where Spotify lacks obvious functionality.

I’d love to use Spotify, and I’m somewhat intrigued by its recent fixation on podcasting, because I listen to both music and podcasts on Sonos, and I’m currently stuck using Pocket Casts because that app also supports Sonos. (Google Podcasts, my top choice, does not.) But every time I run into issues like those described above, it’s just too frustrating to bother.

And this all piles up against my original blocker with Spotify, which, admittedly, won’t be a problem for many: It is next to impossible to seamlessly use your own music because Spotify doesn’t offer a way to upload music that isn’t in the service. I’ve recommended Google Play Music in the past for this reason, and Google lets anyone with a free account upload 50,000 songs to the cloud, which is incredible. No, the service isn’t perfect. But it’s still pretty great.

Unlike Spotify.